I’ve stopped Pinning

I was suckered in, like many others, by Pinterest’s proverbial flashing lights and spinning wheels, by which I mean its pictures of things more beautiful than anything I could ever hope to have in my own house. The beauty of it was simple: if I pinned these photos to some kind of public space wherein others could see what good taste I had, and then never invited any of those people to my actual house, I could maintain a fairly healthy illusion that my pinboard was a reflection of my proper, beautiful life.

There are two major issues I can see with this:

1. If I have time to pin all these things, I probably have time to have an actual, legitimately beautiful life

and

2. No one cares if I have an actual, legitimately beautiful life

My Pinned Kitchen was white and clean and had a Kitchenaid mixer and it smelled equally of sea breezes and mountain air and there were definitely no dogs dropping their fucking filthy hair everywhere.

My Pinned Study had a long table with many ideas written on handmade paper and a floor to ceiling window that overlooked all the streets of Paris and definitely didn’t have chip packets and toner stains everywhere.

I had pinned breakfasts and pinned desserts and pinned hobbies and pinned careers and pinned families.

I had pinned about 50 things before I realised that I was actually browsing the web to find things to pin, rather than browsing the web because that’s a normal part of my day and then pinning them to share with a waiting audience. I was using Pinterest in reverse, pretending that my life was so genuinely fabulous that I couldn’t help but stumble cross glorious kitchens and gorgeous food and everything is just so relaxing in my life.

In reality, I was frantically clicking everywhere, visiting blogs that I knew would have beautiful things on them that I could pin despite having no real opinion of them. I was visiting other people’s boards and just repinning their entire lives because they were more beautiful than mine.

Then I realised.

I pinned a photo of my own breakfast.

I pinned a photo of my own dog.

I pinned a photo of my own study.

It looked pretty good, really. It wasn’t quite the pages of Gourmet Traveller or Vogue Living, but it wasn’t terrible. I pinned a few more things from my real, slightly less beautiful life.

Comments (8)

Love it, Anna! I too have been living a wonderfully whimsical life on Pinterest. I ride a vintage bicycle along cobblestoned streets – a puppy a baguette in the basket and wind in my hair. Look at my long limbs and cute pale pink mini skirt and boots! Isn’t my crisp, white home with billowing curtains beautiful?

I started on Pinterest because a friend and I were sending each other a jillion links every day to cool internet things. Now we just pin them for each other. My Barbie Dream Kitchen Complete With Skull-print Kitchenaid is still in there though ;)